For the past two years, Hatchikian Gallery has developed a partnership with Quai 36 to present artists working both in public space for mural projects and in workshops on canvases or various media. This duality fuels the momentum of practices that combine creative brilliance and aesthetic research, for the deployment of singular trajectories that have been able to establish themselves on the contemporary art scene. To celebrate the two-year success of this partnership, which has highlighted emerging talents from the field of urban art, Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 present a group show that brings together the diversity of the visual propositions of the artists exhibited during recent seasons within this intersectional perspective between the gaze of a gallerist and that of art producers for places in transition. Audrey Hatchikian and Julie Frydman propose a dynamic scenography that combines the heterogeneous universes of the artists who have punctuated two years of encounters and events: an unprecedented encounter will mark the confrontation between the whimsical graphic gimmicks of David Bruce, the inspiring dreamlike architectures of Chazme, the organic colorations of Nelio, the captivating abstractions of Yann L’Outsider, the vibrant geometries of Simon Poter, the humanist calligraphies of Zepha and the magnetic chromaticity of the elements of Zabala.
Yann L'Outsider, a leading artist of the Hatchikian Gallery & Quai 36 partnership.
Yann L’Outsider opened and extended the two-year partnership between Hatchikian Gallery & Quai 36. He was the one who established the connection between the two structures, being the one who initiated the meeting between Audrey Hatchikian, the gallery’s founder, and Julie Frydman, artistic director of the art production house. A permanent artist at Hatchikian since the evolution of his work from urban art to the studio, he is one of the talents identified by Julie Frydman to be included in the pool of artists mobilized by Quai 36 for interventions in public space. Yann L’Outsider then created monumental murals for the ephemeral venue Morpho on the site of the former Pierre Cardin museum in Saint-Ouen, murals at Chaufferie within the cultural hub of Romainville where Quai 36 now has a permanent exhibition space, and more recently a mural that can still be seen along the vaults on the Quai de la station de métro Châtelet ligne 4 (a mural shared with Arnaud Liard, Julien Colombier and Pastel).
Three dimensions of Yann L'Outsider's formal abstraction for an inaugural Carte Blanche of the partnership.
The inaugural exhibition of the Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 partnership was the solo show Carte Blanche by Yann L’Outsider, a long-running exhibition in three sequences to appreciate the different dimensions of the research around abstraction: metaphorical abstraction with canvases in black monochromes with material effects from which emerge projections of white light in an aerosol, through which the artist explores and transcribes the vibrations of space-time in pictorial language; typographic abstraction with a work on the aesthetics of the letter in its various manifestations, which opens to color; and finally formal abstraction directed towards stylized figuration inspired by the choreographic gestualism of graffiti practice in its instinctive energy.
The publication of the monograph Variation(s) by Yann L'Outsider, accompanied by Hatchikian Gallery & Quai 36.
More recently, Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 presented a second exhibition dedicated to Yann L’Outsider, a new solo show staged as a retrospective that spans ten years of research into black-and-white abstraction, central to the artist’s affirmation of his own uniqueness. This exhibition accompanied the remarkable publication of a monograph titled Variation(s) published by LandArtic. A significant milestone that punctuates Yann L’Outsider’s journey, with a focus on this kinetic abstraction of form that constitutes the creative prism, both on walls and on canvases, to translate the oscillation between the dualities and antinomies found in unstable equilibria and nuanced contrasts of light and dark, or in the unpredictable movements of light. Yann L’Outsider always invites the viewer to receive his work as something that occurs on a purely aesthetic level and that constitutes a pictorial event, without seeking to fill the open space of the ineffable and the undecipherable with meaning.
Monograph Variation(s), 2023
Authors: Guillaume Pellay & Nicolas Gzeley
Photographers: Jean Moderne, aka RCF1 & Yann L’Outsider
Editions Land’Artic
240×320 mm (interior) / 248×327 mm (exterior) / 28 mm (thickness)
272 pages
September 2023
Art book, monograph
An aesthetic research that opens up to new daring, to be rediscovered in the occasion of the Retrospectiv group show.
Although the formal abstraction in black and white undoubtedly specified the identity of the artist Yann L’Outsider through his alternation between urban space and the studio, a careful look at the development of his work reveals new and bolder experiments with more accomplished incursions into volume effects or stylized figuration, or more recently, into more luxuriant chromatic forms. As if the abstraction, very mineral in the early works, opened up to plant-inspired inspirations for this new inflection of his work, which can be particularly appreciated by discovering his fresco at the Châtelet station inspired by Monet’s verdant landscapes. The cycle of nature and the dynamics of elements, between infinite and infinitely small and infinite and infinite, are indeed a particularly stimulating field of observation for Yann L’Outsider. Although Brittany is his home and the foundation of his studio practice, the artist also sails out to other inspiring continents, like the sailors, for extended stays that feed the nuances of his work: Reunion has given rise to a series of monochromatic works with relief effects, and New Zealand is currently the island he is traveling to for new artistic roots.
Some of his emblematic works and more recent projects will be featured in the Retrospectiv group show, where it will be interesting to compare his approach to abstraction with that of other artists who, like him, have maintained an artistic practice where the open urban space and the more intimate studio mutually nurture a singular aesthetic research.
Zepha or the visual poetry of calligraphic abstraction.
The second artist presented by Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36, whom we will see in this two-year partnership exhibition, was Vincent Abadie Hafez Aka Zepha. An artist whom Hatchikian Gallery has been accompanying since his evolution from urban art to canvas and whom she had the pleasure of presenting as part of a duo show with Yann L’Outsider titled ConneXe. Zepha’s stylized abstraction is imbued with a universal humanism that is particularly vivifying. His compositions are inspired by the beauty of the written word, which he explores in its aesthetics and infinite possibilities by stretching the poetry of the original lines into the momentum of a visual language in motion, eminently contemporary and vibrant with a mixed chromatic play. Thus, Zepha weaves a graphic narrative that transcends history and civilizations: it honors the memory of the founding writing. Original in its own right, while extending the transmission of creative indiscipline through rebellion that never denies the debt to the ancestral constructions that place us within a genealogical timeline. His work was recognized by MUCEM Marseille, which acquired one of his installations that is now included in the museum’s collections. In exploring his work, one can see how the letter, the source of graffiti practice, crosses the centuries and interweaves cultures as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
The letter and the circle, stylistic figures of Zepha.
The circle is a recurring figure in Zepha’s compositions, opening a dynamic movement and momentum that animates the works, whether they are wall-mounted or displayed on various supports in the studio. The circle is inherently paradoxical: it symbolizes what binds together, the universal bond, but also the spiral of the acceleration of time that threatens the richness of human otherness by dragging it into a destructive uniformity.
The Art Habité I and II exhibition was presented by Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 to highlight the full scope of Vincent Abadie Hafez’s work. «Art Habité» aptly and subtly qualifies Zepha’s research, for whom the Middle Eastern writing and poetry constitute a powerful reference. An art of habit that invades space-time; an art of habit that also represents the state of sweet trance, of the artist whose paintbrush dances with graceful gestures. The plastic beauty of Zepha’s visual language, where letters and words compose nuances, ambiguities, and metaphors, celebrates an iconoclastic plurality that serves as a resistance to the newly named, instrumental, and functional language of closed reason. The chromatic games give a relief and a momentum that are a veritable antidote to the monotony and the retreat into oneself.
A mural by Zepha in Wynwood Miami while the Retrospectiv exhibition is being prepared.
With Quai 36, Zepha participated in the Urban Week Paris Défense 2022 festival. In keeping with her universalist message, Zepha intervenes on the walls of major cities in Europe and the Middle East. For Parisians, a mural created a few weeks ago is visible on a large facade of Boulevard Diderot in the 12th arrondissement. One of her latest works this spring 2024 is a set of walls in Wynwood Miami, a must-see district of urban art, on which he is deploying his monumental stylized calligraphy, rendered in circles and worked in shades of cold colors. Day and night, in rhythm with the pulsations of the city, Zepha has been moving his brush across the concrete, his arms wide open in welcoming the Other, wherever they come from, wherever they live in this world. Zepha will be one of the artists in the Retrospectiv group show, where he will revisit the typographic abstractions of Yann L’Outsider but also the formal universe of other emerging talents from the contemporary urban art scene.
Chazme, the hypnotic horizon of urban architectures: a chromaticity of formal abstraction.
Living in the world is at the heart of Zepha’s artistic approach, but it is also the focus of three artists that Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 were able to present in a collective exhibition titled Projections: Chazme, Nelio and Zabala.
The interest in the architecture of cities is the link, in Chazme’s research, between a muralism that integrates the frescoes into the geometric structure of the buildings and the canvases that open up a questioning about the relationship between Man and the urban artifact. The tangled web of the formal structures of large urban complexes is represented as metaphorical representations of the alienation of Man and the dissolution of social bonds. The artist seeks to transpose, through pictorial compositions of remarkable chromatic subtlety, sometimes tinged with melancholy, the diffuse and unfathomable sensations of the individual facing the labyrinths of his internal confinement and oppressive constructions. Chazme’s work opens up a narrative perspective of dreamlike scenarios beyond postmodern mural segregations, towards hypnotic horizons freed from the burdens of formalism inspired by architecture. His aesthetic proposition seems to reintroduce, within the vertical brutality of formal abstraction inspired by architecture, a poetry in chromatic nuances through which dream becomes an antidote to the objectification of Man in a radical functionality.
Chazme has created murals in several major cities around the world, and participated in the project of the Fauvelle Island with Quai 36 in Courbevoie in 2022, investing a wall with his urban geometries imbued with poetic lines of escape. Chazme is now part of the artists represented by Hatchikian Gallery. His work evokes an intensity of emotions associated with unquenchable questions about the human condition and existential entanglements.
Nelio is a chromatic variation between formal minimalism and organic expressionism.
Nelio’s work was presented alongside those of Chazme and Zabala by curators Audrey Hatchikian and Julie Frydman. Noteworthy for their colorimetric research, these three artists explore the chromatic nuances of formal projections. Nelio composes a dual score between walls that extend their environment and canvases in the studio, but also in the variation that runs through the gradations between formal minimalism and abstract expressionism, two propositions that a priori are antagonistic and that the artist makes coexist through an evolutionary game of lines and colors. Nelio works extensively in series of works: some are marked by the purity of a structural approach, with flat colors and rhythmically aligned lines; others are oriented towards dense, complex compositions, swirling in the mazes of organic forms. Between the two, intermediate works testify to the progression of an approach that never confines itself to the categories and movements of art. The ambivalence and complexity that permeate our relationship with the world are ineffable paradoxes that find a pictorial resonance in Nelio’s visual language.
Nelio has collaborated several times with Quai 36 for interventions in public space, notably in 2022 as part of the project for the Babcock site in Courneuve-Aubervilliers, on the transition site of the Fabrique des Cultures, alongside other muralists, for an open-air urban art walk. He also created a mural on a city façade in the town of Creusot, a municipality that called on Quai 36 to mobilize talent and offer an artistic project integrated into the industrial heritage that bears witness to the region’s mining history. He continues to participate in street art festivals: the end of 2023 was marked by the creation of a mural as part of a mural festival in Kosovo.
Nelio joined the Hatchikian gallery, which also exhibits his work in the more intimate space of the Art Loft, offering the opportunity to explore the richness of his work and appreciate his coloristic virtuosity on a domestic scale.
Zabala, the pictorial realism of the movement of natural elements.
Presented in a group show with Chazme and Nelio, Zabala stands out for his much more realistic work, which nevertheless tends towards abstraction, particularly due to his use of color. Macro-scale paintings, which also reveal an exceptional coloristic talent. Inspired by the oceanic environment in which he lives – the Basque coast of Spain – Zabala transcribes, in a striking chromatic topology, the magnetism of the places and the power of natural elements. A very technical and accomplished pictorial approach allows him to capture, in particular, the movement of water – a favorite element – and the kinetics of waves by exploring the cold chromatic nuances of blue. Rock and forest are also the material of an aesthetic research that questions the materiality of the world we inhabit, as well as the mystery of this world-landscape imbued with the myths and narratives that humans have projected through the natural topologies. A vital energy emanates from his works, on walls and on canvases alike. His frescoes are conceived as pictorial incisions into the surrounding landscape that they honor. As his artistic practice asserts itself, Zabala’s practice evolves: the use of photography to capture natural forms and light is being replaced by a more imaginative approach to composition, always with a realistic appearance. One of his latest murals was created on a concrete block from the Lemoniz nuclear power plant and was designed to be submerged during a large tide. The abandoned spaces between the wild nature and the industrial installations are particularly sought after by the artist.
Zabala is present at the Hatchikian gallery with emblematic works from his research inspired by, among other things, the azure horizons and the abruptness of the oceanic rocks.
As a continuation of the Projections group show presented by Quai 36 and Hatchikian Gallery, which brought together Chazme, Nelio and Zabala, the three artists were exhibited at the Monaco Monte Carlo train station in the summer of 2023. Their works were displayed in large format in the unique architecture of this station, built with rock-faced vaults on several levels. Travellers passing through Monaco were able to appreciate this aesthetic inquiry, with a chromatic nuance, on the rhythm of the lines and horizons of our environments, in the confrontation between the constructed and the natural.
The vibrant colors between stylized figuration and geometric abstraction: David Bruce and Simon Poter.
These are the vibrant colors that Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 have highlighted with a show titled JumpinColors, a scenography punctuated by the vibrant pulsations of a graphic duel between David Bruce and Simon Poter. The radiation of vivid colors, between the stylized pop figuration of David Bruce and the geometric abstraction of Simon Poter, marked the spring of 2023 and the return of the beautiful days at Espace Quai 36.
David Bruce, the pop graphics of street culture.
David Bruce claims a decidedly playful, joyful, and uninhibited art style inspired by street culture and its colorful, acid graphic codes. He works with palpable jubilation to create solar works of contagious vitality. After graffitiing on trains, this former basketball player has set up his studio in Liège. His canvases blend pop figures with a sense of rhythm: bananas and disproportionate fruits, generational smileys, logos that embody the culture of street sports, references to American series and animated blockbusters: all these graphic gimmicks make up a whimsical visual language, with a penchant for curved lines and undulating silhouettes, naive or stylized styles, and humorous morphologies.
The artist was spotted by Nike, who entrusted him with the creative freedom to create a capsule collection of three T-shirts that quickly became collectors’ items. The swoosh is part of the David Bruce’s visual signature as an emblematic logo of urban basketball courts. His work now integrates ceramics with a playful interplay of volumes in curves.
David Bruce was one of the artists invited by Quai 36 to participate in the Urban Week Paris La Défense held in the fall of 2022. Although David Bruce now works almost exclusively in the studio, he occasionally extends his inaugural urban practice with mural interventions. He created an acidic and mischievous mural in situ on the facade of La Défense in the presence of the public: an unprecedented live performance experience for the artist who is now part of the Hatchikian Gallery collections and whose audience will be pleased to see the radiant energy once again at the occasion of the Retrospecti group show.
Simon Poter, a playful geometric abstraction in bright colors.
Simon Poter employs a visual language that captivates the eye with its rhythmic and geometric dynamics and dazzling polychromy. His fragmented planes are punctuated by a dynamic alternation of patterns of shapes and colors, creating a composition of effects of repetition and symmetry. His work, on walls and canvases, or on handmade carpets as unique pieces, is part of the lineage of geometric abstraction and concrete art. Simon Poter’s vibrant graphic arrangements are imbued with the tension of simple forms in pure lines and bold colors. The formal rigor is resolutely defied by the radiant interplay of vibrant pigments with a predilection for yellows, pinks, and purples.
With Quai 36, Simon Poter participated in the architectural project Entract’ associated with the construction of the ArtChipel residence in La Garenne Colombes in 2020. His monumental fresco unfolds as a rhythmic graphic pattern of pulses of color, between repetitive linearity and improvised breaks, which recalls the metronomic nature of jazz. Simon Poter is very regularly invited to work in urban spaces. He is featured in the Hatchikian Gallery lineup with multicolored compositions on canvas but also with works that play with the boldness of monochrome. He has also designed the graphic design of unique floor mats.
The artists gather for the collective exhibition Retrospectiv: a wealth of aesthetic propositions that enrich the contemporary visual language of urban life.
The Retrospectiv exhibition will be an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate so many talents from the contemporary artistic scene brought together, somewhat in the style of an urban festival in a gallery. The viewer will be able to confront the aesthetic propositions and identify, beyond the unique visual identity specific to each artist, convergent inspirations, chromatic affinities, common questions, shared flashes of brilliance, resounding formal audacity, but also trajectories and works that are immeasurable and beyond comparison or classification.
The Retrospectiv group show, marking two years of partnership between Hatchikian Gallery & and Quai 36 and punctuated by events that highlighted iconoclastic and heterogeneous trajectories, will take place throughout the spring/summer 2024 season at Espace Quai 36 within the cultural hub of the Fondation Fiminco in Romainville in the Eastern Paris region.
